“I was not holding her hand,” I said indignantly. I’d released it well before Donata had come in.
“Perhaps not at the moment.” Donata looked out the window, ensuring that all I saw was the brown, gray, and blue tips of the bonnet’s feathers. “I recognize that she is very pretty, in a helpless sort of way.”
“I confess to believing so when I first met her,” I said, always wanting to be truthful. “But this was, of course, before I entered a sunny billiards room and saw your eyes.”
My remark was meant to begin a reconciliation, and Donata did turn to look at me, but she remained distant. She had not yet decided, I saw, how to take my high-handedness.
“You hated me on sight,” she said without belligerence. “I admit that I was furious with my husband at that house party and wanted to punish him for his beastly ways, or at least indicate how much I did not care what he did. I thought I could use you to make my point, and then you ignored me utterly. So galling.”
“You ought to have told me. If I had understood your scheme, I might have gone along with it.”
Donata raked me with a skeptical look. “Doubtful. Your highly developed sense of honor would have forbidden it. Not long after that, I encountered you again, pursuing Mrs. Danbury.”
“Not pursuing her,” I corrected. “I happened to arrive at a house she was in. You were there too.”
“Yes, indeed. I remember. Do not rewrite the past, Gabriel; you were besotted with the creature.”
“And yet,” I said, making my voice light. “Here I am married to you. How do you think that came about?”
The carriage halted before the house, a footman dashing forward to open the carriage door for us.
“I am, unfortunately, a jealous harridan,” Donata said as she made her way past me. “I always will be. Especially of soft, pretty young women with whom you danced, never mind your bad leg. I make no apology.”
She bent to descend from the carriage, careful of her hat, and I steadied her from behind. The rain was coming down fairly hard now, and two footmen stretched a canopy over Donata so her ladyship would not get wet.
Once inside, Donata removed the enormous bonnet and handed it safely to her maid, and stripped off coat and gloves to give to the footman—a ritual dance she performed every time she came home. Before she could head for the stairs, I turned her around and kissed her on the mouth in front of the entire household.
When I let her go, she stepped back, the quiet anger she’d regarded me with since Grenville’s visit softening. “I am afraid that will not cure me of being a harridan,” she said.
“No matter.” I handed my own things to the delighted footman. “I like you a termagant. Barnstable, will you send coffee to the study? Thank you.”
*
Brewster had remained at the Derwents with the surgeon, saying he needed to pay the man and get him safely home. I told Barnstable to send Brewster up to me the moment he arrived here.
The hard-faced surgeon had cleaned Leland’s wound again, checked the lad over, added another stitch to his head, and re-bandaged him. The man had said little except that Leland needed to be well looked after and his wound washed every day. He left a clear liquid, which smelled strongly of spirits, to be rubbed on the gash. Must be done, the surgeon said, even if Leland complained of the pain. Donata and I had stayed at the Derwents’ long enough to hear this before we’d departed.
I did not have to wait much time before Brewster came into the study, ushered by Barnstable, who expressed his disapproval by being coldly haughty. Brewster was a ruffian, hired for his fighting prowess, hardly fitting to be upstairs in the house of young Lord Breckenridge.
“The surgeon is quite competent,” I said once Barnstable had served coffee with the minimum necessary politeness and left us. “I met another like him in the army, very good at saving his patients. My man was chatty, though, immensely cheerful. I suppose good surgeons come from all temperaments.”
“If you’re coming around to asking who he is, I can’t tell ya,” Brewster said with his characteristic frankness. He took a noisy slurp of coffee. “Let’s just say he and His Majesty’s government came to a bit of a disagreement over his skills. As in, he’s good at healing, but knows exactly where to stick the knife if he has to. He shouldn’t even be in the country, if you take my meaning.”
“Ah.” The man had been transported. A transported person returning to England before his sentence was up would be condemned to death.
“So, Mr. Denis would be pleased if you didn’t mention him,” Brewster finished.
“He must owe Mr. Denis an enormous favor for hiding him,” I observed.
“Or t’other way around,” Brewster said. “Now, why am I here, or was it just to put your butler’s nose out of joint?”
Chapter Twenty
“This.” I laid Sir Gideon’s notebooks and papers across the desk. Brewster had pulled up a chair to the end, and I pushed a stack toward him. “Since you can read, I’d like you to help me go through these. You might know some of the people in Mr. Travers’s reports.”
Brewster set down his coffee after another loud sip and put his thick fingers on the top page. “Right. I’ll have a go.”
Sir Gideon had given me not only Travers’s reports but his own for everything he’d been working on in the past six-month. He couldn’t think straight, Sir Gideon had said, thrusting the bundle at me before I’d gone. He’d hoped that perhaps I could make some sense of it all.
True to my word to Denis, I’d told Sir Gideon about Leland being at the Nines and what he’d seen happening there. Sir Gideon had given me his sorrowful look, said Leland was a good boy, and hobbled back to his desk, taking out paper and pen. I had no doubt he’d pass the information on to his cronies, who would set wheels in motion.
Travers’s notes were well written and thoughtful. He’d visited slums and rookeries, reporting on how many people lived in a house and how many to a room, and visited factories where children worked all hours and were black with filth. He’d investigated the dangers of the cotton spinning factories that could ignite and roast all inside within minutes, painting the lives of the workers in grim detail.
He wrote with compassion, describing very young mothers taking care of far too many children, fathers who were drunks or couldn’t find work and were on the edge of despair. He wrote of tiny children taking care of babies while their parents labored all day just to feed them. Travers had opined that the vast factories operating to churn out goods everyone now wanted in quantity meant that the English middle-class lived well on the backs of the factory workers, who saw little for what they did.
Travers also reported on how the desperate often turned to crime. Game girls, rent boys, pickpockets, robbers, and housebreakers—they preyed upon the genteel, and they preyed upon one another. Game girls and boys were sent out by gang leaders to “work,” then the leaders took all their money and gave them bare subsistence in return.
Travers was especially indignant about the plight of the game girls and rent boys. These children, he’d written, know nothing but selling their bodies for another’s use, often being beaten or even tortured to fulfill a man’s unclean pleasure. They receive very little for their humiliation, and what they do receive must be delivered to their overlords or they risk more beating. The overlords are not always the madams or fleecers in their houses, but often the parents of the children themselves.
“He ain’t wrong,” Brewster said when we’d read these passages. “My Emily, she was turned out to make good when she were twelve years old. Started working in the house when she were sixteen. She liked it, she told me, because she knew she’d get a bed to lie in and food the next morning. On the street it’s catch as catch can.”
“The houses are not much better, in Mr. Travers’s opinion,” I said, paging through the notebooks. “He mentions many brothels by name. He has addresses, names of the madams and men who work there, and names of the girls and boys too.”
“I
can’t imagine the madams being happy with that. The young ’uns neither. How else are they going to make a living? Go to all those nasty factories?”
“I agree, the problems seem insurmountable,” I said. “But reformers like Sir Gideon are trying to help.”
Brewster snorted. “Some lads and lasses have a hard time of it, that’s true. But some prefer letting a bloke dip his wick to starving. Starve sometime, Captain. See how you like it.”
When I’d been set upon by French soldiers in Spain, who’d beaten me, hung me from a tree, and left me for dead, I’d gone about five days without food. I’d been in so much pain I hadn’t given it much mind, but I remembered when the Spanish woman had rescued me. She’d put a piece of bread in my hand, and I’d devoured it, animal-like, not caring that my hands were so filthy I must have eaten plenty of mud with it.
I’d lain outside her farm, where I’d dragged myself, for days, watching while a French soldier, a deserter, ordered her about and took his pleasure with her. She’d found me when she’d gone out to the well for water. I’d been hidden in tall grass, whispering to her in Spanish, begging for a drink. She managed to give me the water without the Frenchman seeing me, and I’d promised her my help. At the time, I thought I might die before I could, but finally, she’d brought the man close enough to me. I’d risen from hiding, taking his gun from him, and shot him through the head. Then I’d collapsed into a raving fever.
“I’ve been hungry,” I said. “And thirsty.”
“Starving, I said.” Brewster’s eyes held no sympathy. “Where you can’t think of nothing but the horrible pain in your insides. Weeks since you’ve had a meal. Where a bite of bread is a feast. Where you’ll do anything for anyone who’ll relieve that pain in you.”
I sat back. “You speak from experience.”
“Oh, you saw through me little story, did you? Yeah, I was tossed out by me mum when I was a small chap because I was too hungry for her to keep. She had six others, and my da’ was gone, probably dead. I learned how to steal to keep fed. I and a few other lads banded together, pooled the takings, and started to live a damn sight better than we had at home. The reformers, now, they want to round up poor things like I’d been and take them back to their mums—the women what slung them out in the first place. Me mum could swill the gin, I can tell you.”
“They’re seeking to remedy such things.” My voice did not carry a great deal of conviction, because I agreed with Brewster. The world’s wrongs were too complicated for an easy solution. Mothers did abandon their children, and workhouses and orphanages were places of misery.
“Mr. Travers doesn’t like some of the reformers either,” Brewster said, going back to the papers. “He takes these two, who run a workhouse, to task. Good lad.”
Indeed, Mr. Travers had reported that one workhouse pocketed much money from the parish and philanthropists and kept the children in straits. Had we found motive for someone to silence Mr. Travers?
“I know ’em,” Brewster said, almost proudly. “Mother Mary and Sir Baxter. Pious as angels. Virtuously brings the young ’uns in the front door, sells ’em out the back.”
I put my finger on Gareth’s words. “Those aren’t the names I have here.”
“Wouldn’t be, would it? They were banged up, their orphanage closed. Opened up a new one under new names as soon as they were free.”
“Gareth exposed them again,” I said. “Would they kill him for that?”
Brewster shrugged. “Could do. Wouldn’t need to, though. The law starts looking their way, they slip town and turn up somewhere new with different names, and start all over again.”
“They couldn’t if they were convicted and transported,” I said. “Perhaps Gareth and Sir Gideon were trying to close them permanently.”
Brewster did not look convinced. “What reason would they have to try to kill the Derwent lad, then? They’d wait in the dark for Gareth to come walking alone and gut him. Why lurk about until he’s doing the deed with his lover?”
“To humiliate Sir Gideon, Gareth, Leland, and their reforming zeal,” I suggested. “How can Sir Gideon be so upright, they would be saying, when his own son and Mr. Travers are unnaturals themselves?”
“Maybe,” Brewster said. “But Mother Mary ain’t so devious. She and her man are very straightforward. Clout you if you get in their way, yes, but they wouldn’t have the cunning to set up the two lads as they were found. Some other person did that.”
“How can you be so certain?” I, for one, wanted to get my hands on this Mother Mary and shake a confession out of her.
“The criminal classes ain’t like what’s in novels,” Brewster said comfortably. “They ain’t madmen coming up with strange ways to kill a young woman in an old house somewhere. Your basic criminal is a straightforward bloke. Smash and grab. Even Mr. Denis ain’t hard to understand. He sees something he wants; he puts out his hand and takes it. He’s good at the game, but he ain’t complicated.”
“You have a point, but regardless, someone did kill them and set them up to be found as they were. I want to see this Mother Mary and her cohort. Can you arrange it?”
“Mr. Denis can. If they see me coming, they’ll duck out the back and be long gone. Mr. Denis is more subtle-like.”
Indeed, Mr. Denis could be very subtle. “Any other names jump out at you?” I asked.
“A few. Gimme some paper, and I’ll write ’em down for you.”
I obliged with paper and pen, and watched Brewster painstakingly scrawl out a short list of names. I took it, wondering if any laid before me in black and white would prove to be Travers’s killer.
After another half hour’s perusal of the reports, Brewster announced he’d return to Denis and request, from me, that he put his hands on a few of these people for questioning. “Better than Bow Street, is Mr. Denis,” he said proudly.
I’d seen enough of Denis’s methods to believe that.
The day had darkened while Brewster and I had conferred. I returned to my rooms upstairs after he left to find Donata preparing herself to go out for the evening.
My wife went out every night, when she wasn’t hostessing a do here. It was the height of the Season, and the dowager Lady Breckenridge was invited everywhere. Hers was a world of soirees with champagne and ices, balls that lasted well into the morning, and visits to the opera and theatre in between. A far cry from the world Brewster and I had been reading about where children had to give in to the sordid appetites of the gentlemen who might well turn up at the society balls Donata loved. The reports had angered me. No wonder Sir Gideon had turned reformer.
I entered Donata’s dressing room after a knock to find her at her dressing table, her abigail fussing with her hair. Jewelry glinted in velvet-lined trays, waiting to adorn her neck.
The abigail, who was devoted to Donata, glanced at me, pushed one final pin into Donata’s complex knot of hair, laid down the brush, and discreetly retreated.
Donata paid no attention to me. She smoothed one curl then lifted a heavy diamond necklace. It was a piece her mother had given her, one that had been in her family for years. Donata refused to wear the Breckenridge jewels or any gift her first husband had bought her.
As she started to clasp the strand of diamonds in the back, I took them from her, closed the clasp myself, then leaned down and pressed a kiss to her neck.
“I grow frightened for you,” I whispered when she did not move. I traced a curl above her ear. “Any thought of you being hurt, or lost to me, makes me … brusque.”
Donata’s gaze sought mine in the mirror. “You are used to giving commands.”
“I am. But I never give a foolish one.”
We studied each other, her smooth face and sleek hair a contrast to my hard, rather weather-beaten countenance. “You are unpolished,” Donata said. “I question whether I married you to remedy that or to remind myself that the world is not a tame place.”
“I’m certain Breckenridge reminded you of the latter quite a lot.?
??
Her eyes flickered. “Breckenridge is now my beautiful son, and my husband is an army captain uncomfortable in my house.”
“I would not say uncomfortable.” I laid my hand over her slender one. “The furniture and carpets are quite soft. Unused to it is closer to the mark.”
“Will you ever grow used to it?”
“You would not like me if I did. I would simply stretch out on the divan and snore all of the time.”
Donata twined my thick fingers with her slim ones, and for a time, we only looked at each other in the glass.
“It is Lady Darymple’s musicale this evening,” Donata said presently. “Signora Carlotti has consented to perform. I sent word that you were unwell and unlikely to attend.”
Kind of her. I was worn out with worry, tired of death and the evil people who dealt it.
“I will attend,” I said. “Perhaps a night of music would do me good. As an old, married man, I can nod off in the back row with the gray heads.”
“You will do no such thing,” Donata said, her brisk self once more. “No need for you to bestir yourself, Gabriel. Lady Darymple will be a success tonight only because of her guest. There will be nothing else to recommend the evening, I can assure you.”
“Yes, there will,” I gave her neck another soft kiss, tasting diamonds. “You will be there.”
I smiled at Donata’s sudden, pleased look and left her to garb myself in suitable attire.
*
“You are cruel,” Donata said as we descended in an hour’s time before a townhouse, this one in Upper Brook Street. We hadn’t spoken much during the short, rainy journey, except for Donata explaining who would be at the gathering and whom I should ignore.